Intelligent Awareness in Support of Collaborative Virtual Work Groups

Collaborative Virtual Work Groups (CVWG) are small groups of people that perform tasks, share responsibilities, goals and decisions but are distanced in terms of space, time and cultures, and maintain their connections through technology. Collaborative S ystems support them enabling a shared environment and informing of its state and changes through a mechanism called Awareness. In this paper we argue that these changes and their consequences can be understood in an ontological work context (we call it “se mantic awareness”). This approach allows us to infer the relevance of the awareness info rmation and control its delivery. To do so, we determine a user context (location, device, preferences), which allows us to infer the user willingness to be exposed to this information. The mechanism is enabled through a Multi -Agent System (MAS), where an agency represents each user’s perception and actual context. We also present a case study and discuss the obtained results.